CHART©

Comprehensive Healthcare Analytical Reporting Tool

CHART is a software package that provides comprehensive data management for healthcare researchers and providers. The system was developed with the goal of closing the gap between the clinical and the research data analysis tools.

The collection of healthcare data begins with the need of a professional to answer to a question about a patient’s health. For example, is this patient showing signs or symptoms of an undiagnosedcondition? Is the patient affected by a known condition that must be monitored? Is his/her state of health stable? Every such question requires some type of assessment or measurement to reach an answer, and the standard of care often includes laboratory testing and/or diagnostic imaging.

Those contains a large amount of information that are, in some case, difficult to use on unexploited. For example, if we take the result of a single PCR test for a Urinary Tract Infection, we can highlight the presence of a pathogen but we can’t say anything about the epidemiologic status or, in case, about the evolution of a pathology or follow-up. To have those type of information we need to aggregate more tests results to have a more global overview. The aggregation of different data from different type of test on a given population, allows researcher to move forward the understanding of a condition.

CHART is design to make easier the medical data mining process, collecting information and test results from different sources in different formats and create a data set for a population chose by a query. The user can choose for example a population of people with certain characteristics that have certain values for a given test. For example, patient in a specific age range that is found positive to some conditions and have particular values for some tests. The query is modulable and easy to write. The data set is given to an analysis tool that can run custom algorithms to generate new data and verify or develop scientific hypothesis. This tool can integrate third party software written in the major scientific languages.

CHART is an API accessible through a web browser. It can be installed on a simple NAS or server and can be easily scalable depending of the laboratory requirements. It has the capability to communicate whit the most used medical data storage protocols over the network or on serial ports to get data from existent infrastructures or instruments. The analysis tools, included future third party software, can be run on workstations connected to the network and exchange data with CHART in both ways.

To summarize, we are proposing a package of tools to store, manage and analyze medical data. These tools are designed to optimize the accessibility and functionality of data through indexing and integration with existing systems and software. Our system’s functionality allowing users to design and execute analysis algorithms and queries of archived data related to a patient’s or population’s condition will give medical providers an entirely new approach patient care. The final goal is to help healthcare providers and researcher to answer to a growing demand of predictive models and improve the various aspects of the modern medicine.